It’s time to consider the grave matter of where in our churchyard I
should be buried

That was very unsettling news I caught on the kitchen wireless yesterday, about the nationwide shortage of graves to bury our dead in. Remembering that very busy period we had this time last year when the bells tolled for village funerals week in and week out, I nipped across to St Lawrence’s churchyard mid-morning to check out the space.

I wanted to know that there would definitely be enough room left for me and mine at the point when our last trump shall sound, so I counted up the graves (roughly 210) and the spare grave spaces (roughly quite a few, or loads). The reason it’s a rough count is that it is a small country churchyard with volunteer labour and only three morning services in a month of Sundays. So while some of the gravestones are polished and have their green bits scrubbed off regularly and are bedecked with flowers (both real and paper), some of them are so old and untended that the monumental bits have fallen away and only un-Christian-looking stumps remain.

The south side of the churchyard is where most people end up and where my mother requested she be put “because it gets the most sun”. (I say requested: she absolutely insisted.) The day after she died, I rang up the churchwarden, and he said he’d marked her space already. He had. Very practically, using an iron rod with a Sainsbury’s bag tied round it.

I think I’m going to insist on the south side myself. The north side is much less used, though, and wilder, and there are more wild flowers in the grass. It contains the village’s only creamy-white and beautiful headstone from the First World War, to mark Sidney Genaway, who was 21 when he died on the 18th of April, 1915.

A lot of people prefer to be whisked into crematoria, for reasons I don’t understand. Some people think it’s better for the environment (I don’t get it) and some perhaps want to spare people the emotion of a yawning grave. But I think there should be emotion at a funeral. Always better out than in.

Apparently, “crematoria” is what we should call them, because the builders and architects who manage the trade organisations and institutes call them that. My dictionary (Collins) gives crematoria, but I much prefer crematoriums, to chime with referendums (for which it prefers “-dums”).

Alan Bennett hates crematoriums as much as I do, and describes the reasons for his hatred (whenever he finds himself obliged to be in one) much better than I do. He dislikes the faux-leafiness of their surroundings: “Set in country that is not quite country”. He dislikes the actual buildings: “like the reception area of a tasteful factory or the departure lounge of a small provincial airport confined to domestic flights”. And he really hates the muted tastefulness, where all the design is “decorum-led” and nothing must jar. It is a funeral, for pity’s sake. Someone is dead. Everything jars.

I have found myself more than once at a crematorium outside Oxford (it might not actually be the same crematorium outside Oxford, now I’ve realised they all look the same) where the lack of familiar rite and simple repetition makes the gathering untenable. In the dark and cold of a church, people at a funeral can force themselves together enough to make a noise in concert. Under the lights of a crematorium chapel, with its airport-lounge windows and weird tasteful draperies, no one can muster a voice at all. I am not going to shuffle off this mortal coil with a backdrop of people swallowing and umming and erring.

My friend from north Oxford held her mother’s funeral service at a very small crematorium with no windows, which was easier than most. We didn’t have to sing; we spoke and some of us made jokes and others read stuff. I’ve always assumed that the daughter would follow the mother into this supposedly “greener” and certainly tidier arrangement, but she told me – to my utter surprise – that she wants to be laid in earth, like me, and she wants a “proper” funeral service.